A 110,000-square-foot supermarket at a 2,000-acre Charlotte development caps years of requests from a neighborhood that wanted one badly

Wegmans opens its doors at 11550 North Community House Road in Charlotte at 9 a.m. today, inside the Ballantyne development in the city's south end. At 110,000 square feet, it is the chain's southernmost store, and the company has hired about 450 full- and part-time associates to run it, covering everything from the sushi counter to the cheese shop. Store manager Patrick McGuinness told Wegmans' own newsroom that construction has been "well underway" for months and that his team is "thrilled to begin the countdown to October 14."

Wegmans has been in North Carolina since 2019, when its Raleigh store opened as the company's 100th location and its entry into a seventh state. Since then the chain has added stores in Cary, Chapel Hill and Wake Forest, with a fifth planned for Holly Springs. Charlotte is the state's newest Wegmans address, not its first. Company-wide, Wegmans now runs about 114 stores along the East Coast, from New York down through North Carolina, most of them large-format stores with the in-house dining the company calls Market Cafés.

Dan Aken, Wegmans' vice president of real estate and store planning, said the company didn't have to go looking for this site. "We've received hundreds of requests from locals asking for a store in their area," Aken told REBusinessOnline, a line that tracks with how long Ballantyne has waited. The development's owner, Northwood Investors, had been courting a grocer with more draw than a standard supermarket for years. Clifton Coble, Northwood Office's senior vice president of development, put it plainly in the same report: "Wegmans, of course, was top of mind," adding that the area needed "a more experiential grocer in the community."

The new store doesn't sit alone. Ballantyne itself is a 2,000-acre, master-planned mix of 4.5 million square feet of office space, thousands of apartments, more than 1,000 single-family homes and nearly 600 hotel rooms, built out over two decades. About half a mile from the new Wegmans, Northwood is building The Bowl at Ballantyne, a mixed-use project that has already signed Olde Mecklenburg Brewery, North Italia, Flower Child, Harriet's Hamburgers and Roosters, plus two residential towers and a planned outdoor venue called The Amp Ballantyne. Northwood held the grocery site open for years waiting on the right tenant. The Bowl's restaurant leases came together once Wegmans signed.

Wegmans' newest format runs large: the chain's stores range from about 53,000 square feet in East Rochester, New York, to roughly 160,000 square feet in DeWitt, New York, and Charlotte's 110,000 square feet sits comfortably in the upper half of that range. The company is privately held and does not publish current revenue, but it has stayed in expansion mode, with Holly Springs still pending in North Carolina and a roughly 115,000-square-foot store planned for Pittsburgh, its first in that region.

Ballantyne is the more interesting story here, not Wegmans' map. Northwood sat on a grocery-sized hole in a 2,000-acre plan for years rather than fill it with whatever grocer would sign first. Aken's "hundreds of requests" line is the kind of demand signal most developers never get to cite with a straight face. And the half-mile around the store is filling in fast: a brewery, two restaurant concepts and a planned concert venue, all committed after Wegmans did. Anyone sizing up what belongs near this Wegmans, or building a leasing plan for a center like Ballantyne, can run both through Brandmarch.